Patch update

[fozzmeister]

I'm not a fan of clicking a button with the mouse on the car, i think using a button on my wheel is more realistic. I love the idea of a persistant car, and always have, so I'm happy with that. More importantly has the server lobby thing working properly yet? If they got the MP sorted (as claimed) it'd be great for league, but I haven't managed to get a race for a month so when I do it'll be with known quality groups/people (to me) [SROU or GRC]

[EdamSpeed]

I had a go last night. Joined a DrivingItalia server for a 10 lap race with about 14 people on it. Of course, most of them dropped out after 1 lap or maybe 3.

Seems a little more stable now since the patch. Things like syncing are quicker, but I still have this gnawing feeling of incompleteness with that game.

I'd love to be as 'at home' with it as I was with Namie. My god I loved that game - endless nights with "The 2200 Club" from RSC, hosted on my 2nd PC at home. It was great - the racing was close, there were no network problems, and the cars behaved as you expected and gave great feedback.

'Hikki' is nowhere near as enjoyable for me. Aside from the network problems (most fixed now, I hope), I can't get used to any car - they just seem 'disconnected' from me. Everyone talks about how good the cars feel, and the physics, etc., but I just don't get it - sorry I particularly have trouble with braking - I just can't work out when I'm locking up, and I just cannot get the tracks sorted. That may be just the tracks, perhaps. Perhaps it's the cars too. Never been a fan of single seaters.

I notice the same feelings as above coming from a lot of the Namie players. The ones that seem really happy with Hikki are the people who never raced in Namie. I guess there's a problem with expectations there, or something we're used to.. Maybe it's because we're seeing the same dumb things in Hikki that were present in Namie, and should have been fixed years ago. Little things. Things like, why the hell doesn't the "-" key work in replays to change drivers, when the "+" key does? That was on the cards to be fixed before Namie was released, ffs!

Hikki is still disappointing to me. It feels flat and lifeless. People say that this is because I've never had a good race online, but to be honest I've tried. Ok, I haven't joined a league like GPC, but I don't want to, because a) I can't commit the time, particularly at weekends, and b) I think *I* would be crap. In most of the online races I've done, I've trawled around at the back, because I'm not as fast as the others, or I can't get the set up right, or I forget which way the track goes. I'm forever looking at my mirrors, and can't work out where the other drivers are, so I end up just giving places away. That turns the whole online session into just another hotlapping exercise, and I can't be arsed with that.

Because Hikki contains many of the same bugs as Namie, the same sound effects, same menus, and the same difficulty with the 'lobby' and joining servers, it just feels like Namie with better graphics. And it's taken them *this* long to get better graphics in there and fix multiplayer. I'm not confident of Kunos adding more features or fixing historical bugs anytime before 2008, and I've just got better things to do with my life.

I admire Kunos for striving for realism, and I have to admit that the grip of the cars does feel right, but sometimes it's not enough. Realism is one thing, but when it gets in the way of enjoyment, you just have to wonder why you bother. Realism should be part of a package, not just the only thing. People talk about immersion, and it's a very hard thing to define, but I don't feel 'immersed' in NK Pro. Perhaps it's the menus and interface, it doesn't really feel 'complete' - I'm not in any sort of environment where I feel I have the tools laid out to do my job. The UI doesn't provide much feedback, and looks like it was designed by several different people with different agendas. Hard to feel immersed when you get kicked out to an empty Windows screen after doing a multiplayer race.

Oh, and "immersion" is nothing to do with clicking buttons in your cockpit with a mouse. That's not immersion - that's just an encumberance!

I mean, you could have a racing game where your car starts off in your garage at home. You have to press a few keys and wiggle your mouse to get it loaded on the trailer, strap it down, and then load up the car/van with all your tools and spares. Then you wait 2 hours while the thing drives along the motorway to Brands Hatch, stopping for coffee at Hilton Park and Warwick services. Then when you get there you realise you left your helmet or licence at home. Or you need to change your gearbox in a puddle of freezing water at the bottom of the outer paddock. Then the race comes and you get maybe 1 corner or 1 lap into it, get punted off, and have to wait another 2 hours while you drive home along the motorway with a busted car feeling miserable.

How do those extra hurdles improve your racing experience? They don't. Sure, it would be more 'real', and perhaps more immersive, but that's not the point.

Yes, there should be buttons to press to start your engine, ignition, AIM thingie, and all that, but you should be able to do it from the keyboard. Having to move a mouse around is just wierd and tedious.

Oops. That turned into a bit of a rambling rant, didn't it? Well, that's how I feel. I'm not a noob at Netkar, I've been playing it since the very early days of a badly handling MG ZS at Croft. I loved Namie, and was one of the first to pre-order nkPro. I'm by no means giving up after a few minutes of trying - i've been trying on and off to "get into it" for months now, with not much success.

I'll still keep NK Pro and my licence, and perhaps I'll race it every now and again, but at the moment it just doesn't hold any enjoyment for me. Perhaps that will change with new cars and tracks, we'll see. I'm not holding my breath for new patches, features or additional content though - they'll happen if/when they happen.

[Nick Phillips]

Good sensible read mate well done.

Just not had time to try this out but will hopefully get upto speed with it soon, I like it but obviously it has its shortcomings.

Each to their own would be nice but does not happen often.

[Simon Gymer]

Great post Edam. Pretty much how I felt about it. Then GTR2 came along and removed any of the time I had left to race nKPro and the decision was easy as I wasn't enjoying it at all.

[ginsters sponsored]

Interesting stuff Edam  . You don't feel immersed, or that the physics are great, and I respect your opinion. Thats entirely fair and well argued.

However I don't agree with you here

Yes, there should be buttons to press to start your engine, ignition, AIM thingie, and all that, but you should be able to do it from the keyboard. Having to move a mouse around is just wierd and tedious.

Your not the first, and you won't be the last  , to complain about starting the engine but really is it that much of a chore? Is it really much different than pressing "drive" button? (Perhaps we should have a NK vs GTR2 start you engine race). People would have you believe that its more of a chore than the weekly shoppin but really come on. As for the rest of the racing weekend bit, I don't see how that applies. It does however make me jealous, I would give my right arm to experience some of the real stuff.

[Mark J]

i still keep swimming up to look at the bait....but not quite seen enough to take the bite yet 

[EdamSpeed]

Hehe Ginsters. I have to admire you for your continued love of nKPro. I'm also slightly jealous of that too - I would love to see past Pro's foibles to the game beneath - see the diamond in the rough, but I'm afraid it ain't happening.

We'll have to disagree on many points I'm afraid. I understand why you like the game so much, and I hope you'll understand my 'disappointment' - I think that's the correct word. It's not that I don't like it, but I don't love it either, it currently holds no interest for me. I'm obviously not going to change your opinion of it, and that's not what I'm trying to do - I guess I'm just trying to express in words why I feel the way I feel.

I'm a patient man, so I cannot be accused of not trying, or giving in too easily. As I said in an earlier post, I was one of the pioneers of the Namie 2200 club. Back then, the nk lobby was permanently broken, the server was a DOS app, all the settings were guesswork as there was very little documentation (actually that's still the case), and you had to manually open ports on your router, even if you were just playing, not hosting. Those were the days of perseverence! But we felt it was well worth it, as the game, and the online experience were second to none. Once you were connected to a server, barring a few minor glitches, the net code was pretty good. Somewhere buried on RSC are a few old replays and videos of Namie in action, and viewing them today makes me remember all the good times we had.

So surely, 3 years later Hikki should be a much better experience? It isn't for me.

Just from my own experiences with the new patch and looking at RSC, there are still terrible multiplayer bugs. Join lag, warping, spinning on the grid, and going into orbit with random suspension failures after light contact. The last one noticably has been around since Namie - the person doing the hitting *always* came off much worse, and that's why the racing was so good, as people did everything in their power to avoid hitting someone else.

For me, the will to persevere with these problems and play on is waning. Again, perhaps it's the cars and tracks. I never got on with the spindly single seaters in Namie, and I don't get on with them in Pro. I don't know how to set them up, I can't drive them properly, and they don't "speak" to me. I'm a tin topper, not a spindle-driver Perhaps also it's the feeling that it's been *OVER 6 MONTHS* since Hikki was released, and still multiplayer, the very bedrock of the game, still has some serious issues, and runs worse than Namie..

I'm going to add to what I said earlier about the UI. It's terrible. Once your in a server there's no way of loading / saving setups, which is a real problem in multi. You can't go back to the main program screen either, or you'll be basically quitting - and if the server's disabled joining during qualifying, you're screwed.. Things like seat adjustment and FOV are part of the car's 'misc' setup which is just plain wierd, as they're loaded and saved (and lost) with the setups. The in-game menus look like an afterthought. The control set up screen is a nightmare! "paddle up" / "stick up"? Huh? Only stick up seems to shift gears. Sometimes keys bind, sometimes they don't. Sometimes you get functions mapped to more than one key/button.. Alt-tab doesn't work.

That sort of thing was ok when Namie was a privateer project and new, 3 years ago. Nowadays, it's bordering on criminal. A lot of the UI problems stem back to the very early days of nk in 2002. They still haven't been fixed. Some have been made worse.

Little things like that I could live with, if there weren't so many of them, and I had confidence that they would be fixed soon, but as I say, many been with the project since birth. Perhaps that would be fine too, if I hadn't paid money for the damn thing.

This was the 'fix' list for the new 1.0.2 patch:

- Multiplayer sync improvements
- Physics updates on tires, drivetrain and aerodynamics
- Interface polishing
- Added support links

Ok, so 4 is basically flim-flam. Doesn't add anything.
Number 3 - "Interface polishing" - where? You mean the new BRD logos?
Number 1 - multiplayer sync improvements. Ok, well it does seem to sync better now, but really - 6 months, and a whole load of beta testers - why are there still multiplayer bugs? Why was the Namie multi-code better?
Number 2 - Physics updates on tires. Again, this is supposely a 'fix', but they've actually broken it! The FF1800's tyres are way too forgiving now, even more so than GTR2. Check out the video at http://www.deathnet.org/temp/lol.avi - I've never seen such ridiculous angles from a FFord.

By comparison, this was the fix list for netKar PRO v1.0.1 - which was released about two weeks after the main 1.00 was released:

- New licencing scheme
- Performance tuning in multiplayer
- CrossFaded sound engine option added
- Fixed slow race server list
- Fixed crash when watching a remote car that is out of range for every track's camera.
- Fixed "remove" in Host, Sessions
- Added "move up" and "move down" buttons in Host, Sessions
- Fixed server getting confused after long uptime in Windows.
- Fixed heavy CPU load with car at zero speed
- Fixed skin support in multiplayer
- Fixed crash when hitting "Load" in setup screen without any setup selected
- Removed "save as" button in setup screen
- Fixed connection problems for users behind a router and multiport servers
- Fixed TimeMonitor during Qualify and Practice showing remaining time
- Fixed TimeMonitor during Race showing "lap completed/race laps"
- "Go To Grid" button is now visible with TimeMonitor up
- "Go To Grid" button blinks in green to catch more attention
- "Go To Grid" button is not visible once the race is started
- Interfaces forced to "single car" multiplayer races
- Added "server contacted/received" readout in Multiplayer
- Added colour codes to server list
- Added sort option to server list
- "Join" button is not available for servers "closed" to new clients
- Added flags and nationality for Slovenia, Slovakia, Thailand, Vietnam, Ucraina, Estonia, Croatia, Belarus and Latvia
- Fixed car "exploding" when trying to change setup with a broken suspension.
- Fixed ForceFeedback and Exponential Factor in controllers setting
- Fixed "Norway" spelling
- Changes in nationality are now immediatly reflected in the main driver bar
- Fixed shutdown for some ForceFeeback wheels (Momo Black)
- Fixed track flickering with shaders off
- Fixed "blue" tires with shaders off
- Fixed 6th gears not following ingame setup changes
- Fixed white and checked flags appearing in qualify
- Added "escape" to unassign button and axis in controllers
- Fixed sound option window not remembering "invert" settings
- Fixed pitboard during Qualify showing position
- Key controls are now using CTRL for downshifts and SPACE for upshifts
- Added "pitboard view" using TAB key
- Fixed FTarget autoclutch settings in 1st gear
- Fixed "holes" in Newbury and Crema
- Fixed crash with nVidia MX cards
- Fixed hand and steer movement for remote cars
- Fixed servers randomly disappearing from server list

Bit of a bigger list huh?  That was 2 week's work. And yet the latest patch fixes very very little, and yet we've waited 6 months for it. Ok, I know Kunos has had some personal problems, and I have some sympathy for that, but it doesn't inspire me with much confidence for future improvements.


Phew - I went off on one again. Sorry..

Again, Ginsters I hope you'll understand that although it looks like this was directed at you, it isn't. I'm just trying to convey my feelings about all this. Not trying to convert people into anti-Nk or whatever. I'd dearly like for nkPro to be better than Namie - a step up. At the moment it's a step down. And that frustrates me far more than clicking something with a mouse to start the car

Incidentally, it's not the pressing of those buttons that's annoying - it's the fact that you have to do it with the mouse. That's not any more realistic than pressing buttons on a keyboard, but it is more cumbersome. It's certainly not immersive either - quite the opposite, as I have to consciously grab the mouse. I don't do that in my real car!

And finally, the stuff about the guff I have to go through to get my real car to a real track - the purpose of me posting that was just to demonstrate that putting obstacles in the way of driving in the guise of "realism" doesn't make the sim-experience more rewarding or enjoyable. Locating 3 buttons in a virtual environment (where one may be hidden), pointing the mouse, and then clicking and holding the mouse button down - that's no more 'realistic' than pressing 3 buttons on a keyboard, but it is certainly more annoying when you just want to get out there.

[ginsters sponsored]

Hehe Edam  . We disagree but we clearly share the same passion for this stuff (although your knowledge puts me to shame).

Perhaps, I wouldn't have the same views if i was lucky enough to experience Namie as well? Anyways will read your eloquent post more fully when I'm not to busy trying to race NK, as I'm doing tonight   .

[popabawa]

Any further thoughts on the patch guys? I haven't downloaded it yet as I've been caught up with the start of the GTR2 season.

[picnic]

I got further than you Pops, I downloaded it but that's been as far as I've got.

[ginsters sponsored]

As far as I can see, patch most importantly makes racing smoother and eliminates, for me anyways, GTG bug. Nothing to really drag people in, but does improve experience for those already hooked.

[popabawa]

Thanks SBG, hopefully I'll give it a bash soon

[ginsters sponsored]

Crikey, its a bit quiet in here . Those of you that still have NK, god bless you, do yourself a favour and get yourself the 2001 Spa which is now available to all. I feel myself slipping back to NK land.

[mo]

Just to let you know that you're not entirely alone in NK land Ian   I haven't played it for a while but if you're joining any races I'll give it a go too.
I still haven't had a chance to try Spa but will try this week.......

[cej]

I still have it installed,but I've only been playing the F1 79 mod for rfactor the last couple of weeks     Might give it a go on Spa though